


you know you can't hold me forever

by LookingForShadows



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Angst, Community: fandomaid, F/M, Second Chances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-01
Updated: 2011-04-01
Packaged: 2018-09-24 02:43:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9696212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForShadows/pseuds/LookingForShadows
Summary: Second chances are rare, but Alex and Izzie might get one, after all.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Posting here Feb 13, 2017. This was written for fandomaid in the spring of 2011, but (for reasons I've long forgotten, apparently) not posted on LiveJournal at the time. I believe the original was emailed to its recipient, but that email account is long gone, so really, I have no clue.
> 
> Title (presumably not the original) is from "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John.

Their relationship is comprised of contradictions.

He contemplates this as he talks into the corn silk of her hair, soft and smooth; tells her that he loves her more than he deserves. He feels like an asshole for telling her to go. For essentially ordering her out of his life.

It’s for the best. He has told himself this every day for the year, two months, and seventeen days since she packed up her things and left.

“Dammit,” he mutters, and punches his pillow, trying not to remind himself of the times he spent with her, of the way her hand was always just there.

It doesn’t matter anymore. None of that does now. She’s gone, he thought he got too lucky but convinced himself that he deserved better, so he kicked her away like a whining puppy and she left him.

* * *

 The doors closed on Death.

She stood there in her beautiful pink prom dress and George stood there in full military dress, honorable, her best friend, and the doors close on Death before George can take her hand or she can stretch hers out.

And like water slipping through the hands of God, she falls back to Earth and into this life that is hers and feels so strangely out of place.

She has lost George. She has survived Stage IV metastic melanoma, and gotten married, and watched her friend get married on a post-it. She gave birth to a daughter and fought with her mother and they came back, slipped away again.

So, yes: she crashed back to this life like an injured bird, and when her wounds are torn open again by the man who says _he_ deserves better – that she doesn’t give enough – that he loves her far more than she does, she leaves.

* * *

She has a new email. He shouldn’t be surprised, but he is, and the jarring _Stevens_ hurts far more than he could have thought it would.

_Iz,_

He writes the two letters and a comma and stops, unable to think past all the things he won’t tell her. All the things in this email that he will write, save in drafts, and wait until it’s deleted by his email. He will say a million things. They will all be wrong.

None of them will be _I’m sorry._

None of them will be _I made a mistake._

And every word will scream _I love you._

* * *

She wonders how much has changed since she left. She knows about the shooting. How that wacko was after Shepherd. How could she miss it, after it was national breaking news? She scanned the list of the dead, worried when the names weren’t released. It was Meredith who answered her text: _We’re all alive._

She stared at the three words. _We._ Who was ‘we’? She had asked if everyone was okay. Did ‘we’ mean ‘everyone’? Alex, Mer, Cristina? Bailey, Derek, the Chief, Owen. Callie? Dr. Robbins, Dr. Altman? The newbies – April, Avery, Percy, Reed?

Oh, God. He couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t picture it. And yet he had seen her dead…she had died…but he never could.

And what was okay? Was okay alive? Vegetative? Seriously injured? CNN radio was deafening in the quiet of her car. “The shooting took place almost exclusively in the surgical wing of Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital,” the announcer’s deep, gravelly voice announced. Her stomach rolled. _Alive._ Her friends—her family—hadn’t come away with minor scrapes.

* * *

In the weeks of recovery, he thought he saw her.

Every time, it turned out to be Lexie, and the disappointment came crashing back all over again.

 _I got shot. Izzie’s gone._ Like the beating of his heart, the thoughts were precisely incessant.

The only reminders of her are their memories, and as she fades from everyone else’s mind, he is the one who clings to her last fleeting smile, knowing every day that it was his own damn fault he let her go.

* * *

Tacoma’s nice, she finds. The days pass quickly, as she throws herself into work. She’s not close to many people, although her neighbor is a relaxed, sarcastic lawyer who she can count as a friend. Her name’s Sarah, and although it stings painfully as the name of the daughter she’s only ever known in her head, the two of them will talk work and clothes and politics over Sarah’s pasta and her garlic bread.

They both have mistakes, this much is certain, but they don’t mention their pasts. It’s better that way. 

The weeks pass. She recognizes Erica Hahn on a consult from a distance, but ducks her head and doesn’t give any indication that they know each other, that her dead best friend’s ex-wife was Dr. Hahn’s girlfriend, that they are no longer at the hotbed hospital of Seattle.

The months pass until just over a year has gone by.

* * *

One year, two months, and seventeen days have passed when Alex, who is grudgingly still going for peds, walks into fifteen-year-old Hannah Klein’s room.

“Hannah Klein, fifteen, admitted last night at…”

The intern continues to talk for a minute or so more and Alex checks the chart before looking up, intending to ask the Kleins a few questions and then some of the daughter, but he stops dead.

Her honey-brown eyes. Her long, serious nose. The oval curve of her face. And the determined set of her jaw.

This is the daughter she hated to speak of, the six-year-old Sarah she carried around in her jacket pocket.

This is Izzie’s daughter.

He realizes belatedly that he is staring at the teenager and shakes his head. “Sorry. You remind me of someone I know – knew.”

The girl’s eyes develop a curious glint that he doesn’t recognize. “Yeah?”

* * *

Her damn cell phone rings. She’s on her first date – set up by an older scrub nurse who has taken a liking for friendly Dr. Stevens – since everything happened in Seattle, and it wasn’t going _too_ badly when her cell phone rings.

“Sorry,” she apologizes with a flashing smile. “I’ll just be a second.”

She ducks outside quickly, huddled under the overhang from crashing rain, when she sees the Seattle number. She sighs and picks it up. “Damn it, Mer, stop calling.”

“Isobel?” says a pleasant voice.

“Dr. Robbins?” she asks, disbelievingly.

“Oh, good. Dr. Stevens,” Arizona Robbins says cheerfully. “I have a favor to ask…”

* * *

Alex paces into the hallway and then back behind the nurses’ station again as Robbins talks to Izzie. Talking to Izzie. On the phone. Talking about Hannah A. Klein, age fifteen, whose leukemia is back with a vengeance. Talking and agreeing and she’s coming back.

“Karev?” Robbins says, and he’s infinitely grateful that she’s on this case instead of Stark, that asshole. “She wants to talk to you.”

She moves away, a worried glance over her shoulder, and Alex picks up the phone. “Hey.”

“Hi,” she says softly. Her voice. “Is it…?”

“You can come,” he says quietly, understanding what she means automatically. “I don’t mind.”

And then he hangs up the phone, too preoccupied with these millions of thoughts swirling around in his head to talk to the woman who tortured his heart.

 

His interns have scattered, so he is left to look after Hannah Klein. She blasts crazy dance music until he says that he’ll throw her iPod out the window if she pretends one more time to turn down the volume and doesn’t. Hannah complies, grumbling like he can imagine his sister would, and he takes her vitals.

“So you know my birth mom?” Hannah asks as he notes her blood pressure.

His stomach rolls one, twice. “Huh?”

“Don’t play stupid,” she snaps at him. “Mom told me that my biological mom was the one who donated the bone marrow when I was eleven. That she’s a doctor here.”

“She doesn’t work here anymore,” he says, and pauses. He looks at this fierce slip of a girl who has her spirit and determination, and nods. “We were married.”

“Were?”

He snorts. “Some things just don’t work out, kid. But—yes.”

* * *

It all looks frighteningly familiar. Oh, God, why did she come? She can’t handle this.

Mer looks over. “Good to have you back.”

She nods, barely able to sustain any sort of thought process.

“You nervous?”

“Me? Nervous?” she says with a high-pitched, anxious laugh. “Why would I be nervous? It’s only my biological daughter who I’ve barely seen since the day she was born. Who doesn’t have a freaking clue who I am.”

Mer’s glance slides over for a second as she stands up from the bench outside the hospital where they’ve been contemplating things. “I don’t think that’s why you’re nervous.”

That lingers between them as they enter Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital.

* * *

He sees her again walking up the stairs with Robbins, wearing street clothes and lightly tapping her fingers along the side of her purse like she does when she’s nervous.

He missed her.

He leans over the chart of a three-year-old with appendicitis, pretending to scribble something down when Robbins calls out, “Karev!”

He looks up; she raises an eyebrow. “Prep Hannah Klein.”

He nods and smiles a little at her. She manages to give an odd, weak sort of smile back.

He walks into Hannah’s room and she cranes her neck at him, looking up from her iPod, which this afternoon is blessedly connected to headphones. “You supposed to prep me?”

He nods. “Where’d your parents go?”

“Cafeteria.” She shrugs. “Dad couldn’t stop pacing and Mom said she needed coffee.”

“Don’t we all,” he mutters, and steals another look at her as she fiddles around with her iPod. She…she deserves to know. She has the physical resemblance, anyway, even if the perky sarcasm wasn’t there. “Hey. You’re good at keeping secrets?”

She looks at him archly. “Most of my friends think that I’ve moved to Illinois for boarding school. What do you think?”

He yanks open the curtain—the patient next door was discharged half an hour ago—and watches as she and Robbins look over some last-minute forms. “See the blonde woman over there?”

“They’re both blonde.”

“With the brown purse.”

She nods. “Okay…?”

“That’s Izzie Stevens,” he says, her name nearly catching in his throat, and swallows.  “Your birth mom.”

“Oh,” the girl breathes, and looks at her. “She…"

He smiles. Izzie’s always been indescribable.

* * *

She wakes up from a quick nap, the sedative from the procedure having worn off, in a spare bed in the clinic. He’s sleeping in one of those uncomfortable plastic chairs in a corner.

“Hi,” she whispers.

He wakes up, rubs his eyes with one hand. “Iz.”

She opens her mouth to say something, but everything sounds wrong. They’ve both changed. They’re different people.

And yet, everything between them has remained the same.

He walks over, gives that grim little smile of his, and sits on the edge of the bed. She looks at him, her hip starting to throb but her fluttering, excited heart covering up any pain.

“You want to try this again?” she asks, so softly he can barely hear her.

“Yeah.” Alex nods, and slips his hand in hers.


End file.
